


Secrets of the Calendar

by Gehayi



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Aging, Gen, Immortals, Time (Freeform), calendars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-04-07
Packaged: 2018-05-31 19:05:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6483544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gehayi/pseuds/Gehayi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Methos wasn't certain how old he was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Secrets of the Calendar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sarahrb210](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Sarahrb210).



> Prompt: Highlander, Methos, He kinda left a few 0s off his age when he even gave a number.

Methos wasn't certain how old he was.

This had nothing to do with his memory--lies to MacLeod aside, he recalled perfectly what life had been like before he'd taken his first head--and everything to do with calendars. Even Immortals tended to forget that the current calendar hadn't always been the norm. 

Take his journals. Yes, he'd been scribbling them almost since writing was invented...but when had he _begun?_ He could recall writing on papyrus during the season of Inundation in a small village in what would later be Upper Egypt. However, that had been long before the pharaohs, before Upper Egypt's first king, Scorpion, and even before the Sothic calendar. And even afterwards--well, he hadn't been counting the decades (or had it been centuries?) that he spent with the Horsemen.

More to the point, calendars _changed_. How was he supposed to explain a date like "in the season of Kīt Šatti, on the nineteenth day of Araḫ Ṭebētum"? It had been a perfectly cromulent way--thank you, _Simpsons_ \--of describing a precise date in Old Babylon, but it didn't translate well. "Winter, sometime around mid-December or mid-January" was the best modern approximation he could make, at least off the cuff. The Tibetan calendar, the Attic calendar, the Coligny calendar of Gaul's Celts, the calendar of ancient Albion, the Florentine calendar of the Middle Ages, calendars with nine or ten days in a week...there had been so many. It was almost impossible to calculate time in an unbroken stream.

More important, however, was the fact that no one, not even the brightest Watchers, seemed to have spotted.

His journals had begun about the time that people had started recording things in written language: cuneiform, hieroglyphics, pictograms. He'd been an adult Immortal then, and while he didn't recall every journal entry he'd made over the course of a very long lifetime, he had been younger and brasher then. He doubted if he'd concealed that fact.

Which, if you followed that thought to its logical conclusion--and why the hell _hadn't_ anyone?--meant that he'd been born before writing _existed_. 

There had been no way to count the years when he was born. No one had thought in terms of things like "years." There had been Before, the Future (always a dangerous time, filled with teeth and claws and cold that killed), and Now. 

How long ago had that been? Forty thousand years? Fifty thousand? Two hundred thousand?

Not that anyone could tell by looking at him. No one would associate Adam Pierson with what people now called Cro-Magnons or Neanderthals. 

Which was just as well. Because if they did realize that he might well be close to a quarter of a million years old, they might also grasp how he'd won every swordfight in that length of time.

Quite simply, he hadn't.

The first time he'd been beheaded had been long, long before he took his first head. The moment his head had come off and he had become no more than a Quickening, he had been enraged to the point of homicidal fury, determined to fight the other Immortal (whose name he had never learned) with every scrap of ferocity he had honed in an extremely long life. 

The other Immortal had been no more than a child--a century or two, no more. He had been no match for a Quickening so much older and more powerful.

And when it was over, Methos had stood up in a brand new body and had walked away.

He'd worked on his swordsmanship after that. He hadn't taken any heads, for a long, long time. He hadn't been certain if what had happened was the norm for his kind. The idea of being utterly extinguished--as that young Immortal had been--was repulsive.

He'd been decapitated on other occasions--sometimes because he had been thoroughly outmatched, and other times because (as he'd been when he first met MacLeod) he'd been driven to a corner and believed that a new body would be the best way to survive. He'd been both man and woman in his time, white, black, Middle Eastern, and Asian. Small wonder the Watchers thought that so many of the Methos Chronicles were fraudulent. They didn't all describe the same person.

Only the Horsemen had recognized Adam Pierson as their old brother. Had he ever told Kronos, Silas and Caspian about his first beheading? He might have. He'd been younger and far more stupid then. Cassandra had recognized him, too, despite his having had a different face since the late eighteenth century...but she always possessed a knack for seeing past disguises and masks to who people truly were. 

All gone now. Which meant there was no one left who could guess the truth.

There was no need to battle for the Prize. The Prize was already his.

He was so incredibly old now, and there was no one now who was of an age even marginally close to his. No one could survive taking his Quickening into their body. It had been centuries--or perhaps millennia, who knew?--since he had had to battle for control of a new body. By now, his Quickening was a tsunami of power. No mind was equipped to deal with a flood of a quarter of a million years of memories.

He'd been on the verge of telling Darius once. Darius had experienced a Light Quickening; he might have understood. But he wouldn't have appreciated Methos quoting the Bible to make his point:

_The last shall be first, and the first shall be last._

**Author's Note:**

> I had to study the Mayan calendar some years back and then had to convert a Martian calendar to the Julian one about two years ago, so the oddities of calendars sprang to mind.
> 
> Regarding the calendars that Methos mentions:
> 
> The [Sothic cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sothic_cycle) \--an Egyptian calendar--measured the sidereal year, not the lunar or solar one, and it lost a day every four years. It was also dependent on latitude. This calendar was vital to figuring out when the Nile was going to flood.
> 
> The Tibetan calendar adds a thirteenth month every two or three years. And the days are...[complicated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_calendar#Days).
> 
> The Attic calendar began with the first new moon after the summer solstice. Each lunar month was broken up into either three batches of ten or two batches of ten and one of nine. The decads, as they were called corresponded to the waxing, full and waning moons. And an extra lunar month was inserted every three years or so. Since it was a lunar calendar, obviously when everything happened shifted from year to year.
> 
> The [Coligny calendar](http://caeraustralis.com.au/celtcalmain.htm) is a lunisolar Celtic calendar consisting of 62 months in a five-year cycle, two of which were inserted into the calendar at certain intervals to make sure the sums came out right.
> 
> The Florentine calendar began at sunset (so talking about "the third hour of the day" would not refer to 3:00 a.m. or or the monastic hour of Terce [about 9:00 a.m.], but three hours after sunset), and [the new year started on March 25](https://books.google.com/books?id=fNmNKURtYr4C&pg=PA243&lpg=PA243&dq=medieval+florentine+calendar&source=bl&ots=5nGn4858Bx&sig=q54v6-_CwBR1K4PiZWsehV0IP0c&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjsk5T0x9XLAhVHPiYKHdC6AtIQ6AEIKjAD#v=onepage&q=medieval%20florentine%20calendar&f=false).
> 
> The Romans had a _nundinae_ , or market week, that was [eight days long](https://books.google.com/books?id=IU2Fu11RCvwC&pg=PA6&dq=calendars+with+nine+days+in+a+week&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi96YOVydXLAhVFSiYKHblmCvkQ6AEIQTAC#v=onepage&q=calendars%20with%20nine%20days%20in%20a%20week&f=false). 
> 
> The ancient Baltic calendar had [a nine-day week](https://books.google.com/books?id=gMd7AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA74&dq=nine-day+week+baltic&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiSk97A1vvLAhWFKCYKHTBnA-0Q6AEIITAB#v=onepage&q=nine-day%20week%20baltic&f=false). 
> 
> A ten-day week was used in China during the Xia Dynasy. The French Republican calendar likewise had weeks of ten days, though this stopped in 1802.
> 
> So of course Methos doesn't know exactly how old he is. How could he?


End file.
